Digiday: WSJ has 21 people detecting fake videos

Twenty-one staffers at The Wall Street Journal are on a committee to detect deepfakes, a technique to produce fake videos by using artificial intelligence, ahead of the 2020 general election, reports Lucinda Southern at Digiday.

The report detailed the Journal’s process:

Last September, the publisher assigned 21 of its staff from across its newsroom to form the committee. Each of them is on-call to answer reporters’ queries about whether a piece of content has been manipulated. The publisher has issued criteria to committee members which help them determine whether the content is fake or not. After each query from a reporter, members write up a report with details of what they learned.

This is part of the Journal’s plan to root out so-called “deepfakes,” content that has been manipulated by artificial intelligence, which has been a growing concern for publishers like Reuters and The Washington Post over the last year.

Heightened political tensions, increasingly sophisticated technology and the speed at which fake content can spread, has elevated the importance in spotting these fakes.

Read the full article here.